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Back when Shakespeare said you were the paragon of animals, both noble in reason and infinite in faculties, he did so during a time when physicians believed the body was filled with black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, and all sickness and health depended on the interaction of those fluids. Lethargic and lazy? Well, thatís because you are full of phlegm. Feeling sick? Maybe youíve got too much blood and should go see a barber to get drained. Yes, the creator of some of the greatest works of the English language believed you could cure a fever with a knife.

Itís easy to laugh at the very wrong things that people once believed, but try not to feel too superior.

Physicists interested in Space specialize in either the mathematical side (becoming Astrophysicists) or the observational side (becoming Astronomers).
Astronomer Halton C. Arp is the new Galileo who disproved the "Redshift equals distance" assumption which is the key to the Big Bang theory.
Arp was Edwin Hubble's assistant. Working at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories in the US, he discovered that many pairs of quasars (quasi-stellar objects) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly - and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically associated with galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by.
Because of Arp's photos, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away - on which the "Big Bang" theory and all of "accepted cosmology" is based - is proven to be wrong! The Big Bang theory is therefore falsified.

"You may think of the academic scientist as the analogue of the independent artist. In fact, nearly all scientists are employed by some large organization, such as a governmental department, a university, or a multinational company. Only rarely are they free to express their science as a personal view. They may think that they are free, but in reality they are, nearly all of them, employees; they have traded freedom of thought for good working conditions, a steady income, tenure, and a pension. They are also constrained by an army of bureaucratic forces, from funding agencies to the health and safety organizations. Scientists are also constrained by the tribal rules of the discipline to which they belong. A physicist would find it hard to do chemistry and a biologist would find physics well-nigh impossible to do. To cap it all, in recent years the 'purity' of science is ever more closely guarded by a self-imposed inquisition called the peer review. This well-meaning but narrow-minded nanny of an institution ensures that scientists work according to conventional wisdom and not as curiosity or inspiration moves them. Lacking freedom they are in danger of succumbing to a finicky gentility or of becoming, like medieval theologians, the creatures of dogma."
- from The Ages of Gaia (OUP, 2000), Preface pp. xvii - xviii.

A rival explanation to Arp's is offered by Professor Paul Marmet, Ph. D. (1932-2005), Order of Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, President of the Canadian Association of Physicists (1981-82). He, too, defied Orthodoxy and was hounded for it; he was forced to publish in fringe journals like 21st Century Science and Technology.

As you know, I am retired from the physics department of the university of Ottawa. However, during the last three years, I still had an office at the university, as a voluntary professor, because I was the supervisor of a graduate student (completing his Ph. D. in electron spectroscopy). A few months ago, he completed his degree and I have been ordered to leave my office at the university. The head of the department explained that it was because I keep questioning the fundamental principles of physics. The exact words were: "Ton problŤme est que tu remets en question les principes fondamentaux de la physique".

Einstein the scientist was a very different person from Einstein the man. As far as I can tell, he was ruthless, for example, in suppressing Dayton Miller's work on aether drift, and in asserting his own precedence over Paul Gerber re his prediction for the precession of Mercury's orbit. (Gerber had published the same formula in 1898. The subject has been a matter for debate ever since.) He may well have acted in good faith, believing completely in his own model, but the net result was that false theories have dominated physics for nearly 100 years.

DO NOT ASSUME THAT IF SPECIAL RELATIVITY WERE INVALID, THIS FACT WOULD LONG AGO HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED WITHIN ESTABLISHMENT PHYSICS.
The reason it has not been is that almost everyone with a sufficiently bold and critical view of the subject to develop sound arguments against SR has not been allowed to flourish within the establishment. Great numbers of reliable accounts of such intolerance have been told.
One of the most recent comes from a new NPA member who, when doing graduate work in physics around 1960, heard the following story from his advisor: While working for his Ph.D. in physics at the University of California in Berkeley in the late 1920s, this advisor had learned that all physics departments in the U.C. system were being purged of all critics of Einsteinian relativity. Those who refused to change their minds were ordered to resign, and those who would not were fired, on slanderous charges of anti-Semitism. The main cited motivation for this unspeakably unethical procedure was to present a united front before grant-giving agencies, the better to obtain maximal funds. This story does not surprise me. There has been a particularly vicious attitude towards critics of Einsteinian relativity at U.C. Berkeley ever since. I ran into it in 1985, when I read a paper arguing for absolute simultaneity at that year’s International Congress on the History of Science. After I finished, the Danish chairman made some courteous remarks about dissidents he had learned about in Scandinavia, and then turned to the audience for questions. The first speaker was one of a group of about 4 young physics students in the back. He launched immediately into a horrible tirade of verbal abuse, accusing me of being entirely wrong in my analysis, a simplification of the Melbourne Evans analysis–”Evans is wrong; you are wrong,” he shouted. He accused me of being way out of line to present my “faulty” arguments on his prestigious campus. When I started to ask him “Then how would you explain…”, he loudly interrupted me with “I don’t have to explain anything.” The rest of the audience felt so disturbed by all this, that the question session was essentially destroyed."

Physics Not Without Philosophy
An interesting question from Phil:
"I am wondering if you could give me some pointers as to how to learn physics so that philosophy is not left out entirely."
I unabashedly and quickly recommended that he read "The Scientific Worldview," first. Learning physics during the current "Dark Age of Einstein" and the hey day of the enslavement of physics by mathematics is not easy. My own experience with physics was this: My first course was Physics 101, which talked about there being four dimensions and all the strange paradoxes that Einstein devised. The text had a lot of cartoons, but I couldn’t make head or tails out of half of it. I got my only college C in the course. I took Physics 102 in the summer so I could concentrate on it. It was taught by an 80-yr old professor who totally ignored “modern physics” (i.e., the Einstein stuff) and taught the classical physics in the second half of the Sears and Zemansky College Physics text (3rd ed.). That made sense to me. I got an A+ in that course.

Philosophy was the same for me. I read “Science and the Modern World” by Whitehead and was totally confused, thinking that I must be pretty stupid. After I discovered “univironmental determinism” 20 yrs later, I went through the Whitehead book again, crossing out all the BS swiftly. There wasn’t much left of it after that. In reading much other philosophy, I found that most of it is nonsense, some of it pretty high-brow, but nonsense all the same. The universe consists of matter in motion. The idea of matterless motion that philosophers and “modern physicists” promulgate is just that, only an idea. It is popular for religious and political reasons. There could never be any experimental proof for it. I find it particularly disconcerting when those who call themselves scientists entertain such notions. Our goal is to discover the truth (via interaction with the external world), not to sell ourselves to the highest bidder for fantastic promises that can never be realized.

Why do you use the term "scientific philosophy" instead of "philosophy of science"?
Traditionally, the philosophy of science is studied and taught by philosophers, not working scientists. I know hundreds of scientists, but few admit to having studied the philosophy of science. Although mistaken, some of them claim to have no philosophy at all. All of them recognize that science can advance only by interacting with the external world through observation and experiment. They seem to view philosophy as too mixed up with religion and thus irrelevant for their work.

However, in view of the numerous silly so-called "scientific" hypotheses we suffer today (time as a dimension, banging universes, etc.), it is obvious that working scientists need to improve their theoretical foundations. Today's philosophy of science is a mishmash of conflicting presuppositions that have been of little help in cleaning up the theoretical mess left over from the 20th century. Perhaps by using the less popular term "scientific philosophy" we can at least put science first literally if not actually.